Walkabout is based on
the
novel by Australian author James Vance Marshall
and was originally published as "The Children" in
1959. It has become a
classic in Australia and England. It's
written
by Edward Bond, whose screenplay plays out as a
meditation onthe
decay of civilization and
the stupefying purity of the wilderness. Director and cinematographer
Nicolas Roeg
("Performance"/"Don't Look
Now"/"Bad Timing"),
in his first
solo effort as director,provides
some
visually stunning nature shots, fills the tale with
rich symbolism
over the clashes between primitive and civilized
cultures, clearly
shows how the superior culture has little regard for
the land through
its wasteful hunting and its exploitative
environmental strip-mining of
the natural resources, and tags on how difficult it's
for these
differing cultures (and races) to communicate with
each other. John
Barry's otherworldly romantic musical score adds to
the movie's
visceral pleasures. It's a unique survival film, that
has become a cult
favorite.

In its simplest terms
it's
the story of an attractive fourteen-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter, who was 17)
and her playful
6-year-old little brother (Lucien John, the real-life
son of Roeg)
residing in a hi-rise luxury apartment
building in Sydney, Australia, with their mother and
depressed
upper-class English geologist father (John Meillon), who takes the children
for a picnic in
the outback and tries to shoot them and when that
fails blows up the
car and shoots himself. The children dressed in their
school uniforms
are left abandoned in the harsh barren Australian
outback and after a
few days have a difficult time surviving on their own.
They are saved
by a 16-year-old aborigine on a walkabout (a tribal
initiation into
manhood, where he goes out alone in the wilderness to
see if he can
survive for six months), who helps the parched-lipped
weary kids,
fishes-out-of-water from their familiar comfortable
materialistic
world, lose their innocence about living naturally by
getting them to
tune into nature. The modern civilized children, even
with their
education, are lost souls in the mystical desert and
are only saved
through the survival
skills of the aborigine who shows them how to get
water (sucking water
out of a dry creek bed with a fluted piece of wood)and hunt the desert
animals, like the
kangaroo and lizard, with his spear.

But Roeg is concerned
with
far more than his film being merely a Disney
wilderness survival tale,
and wishes to convey how sterile is the white city
life compared to the
beautiful unspoiled landscape of the outback, how the
contact between
the aborigine and the white girl arouses in him a
primal sexual urge
toward her--something she cannot quite understand in
its full meaning
to his way of life, which turns out fatal for him (I
found this
sequence implausible and awkwardly tacked onto the
story, and it would
have been better off not going in this direction
unless it made itself
a lot clearer). Roeg also wishes to make a strong
statement about how
the European culture exploits the more trusting
primitive world and
greedily tries to possess the natural resources that
the natives have
been the caretakers of since ancient times (having the
aborigine come
across homesteaders who kill without reason and energy
companies that
rape the land and then leave it abandoned and
despoiled). Roeg
questions the Europeans need for progress that takes
them farther away
from their roots with nature (though not saying
progress is a bad
thing, only that it's questionable if it entails
destroying another's
culture, destroying the environment, and not sharing
the wealth with
others).If
you don't like the
message of the Noble Savage being superior to the
educated European,
because of his willingness to live in harmony with
Mother Earth, at
least it's delivered through some beautiful visuals
and the
storytelling is first-class.